HISTORY
The
de
Havilland Aircraft Company
was a British aviation manufacturer
founded in 1920 when Airco, of which
Geoffrey de Havilland had been chief
designer, was sold to BSA by the
owner George Holt Thomas. De
Havilland then set up a company
under his name in September of that
year at Stag Lane Aerodrome in
Edgware, near London. The company
later moved to Hatfield in
Hertfordshire. De Havilland Aircraft
Company was responsible for
producing the first passenger jet
and other innovative aircraft.
Initially, de Havilland concentrated
on single and two-seat biplanes,
essentially continuing the DH line
of aircraft built by Airco, but
powered by de Havilland's own Gipsy
engines. These included the Gipsy
and Tiger Moths. These aircraft set
many aviation records, many piloted
by de Havilland himself. Amy Johnson
flew solo from England to Australia
in a Gipsy Moth in 1930.
The Moth
line of aircraft continued with the
more refined (and enclosed) Hornet
Moth and Moth Minor, the latter
being a low-wing monoplane
constructed of wood. One of de
Havilland's trademarks was that the
name of the aircraft type was
painted on using a particularly
elegant Roman typeface, all in
capital letters. When there was a
strike at the plant, the artisans
who painted the name on the planes
used the same typeface to make the
workers' protest signs.
The DH
84 Dragon was the first aircraft
purchased by Aer Lingus, who later
operated the DH 86B Dragon Express
and the DH 89 Dragon Rapide. De
Havilland continued to produce
high-performance aircraft including
the high-speed twin-piston-engine DH
88 Comet
mail
plane, one of which became famous in
its red livery as the winner of the
MacRobertson Air Race from England
to Australia in 1934.
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The
high-performance designs and wooden
construction methods culminated in
perhaps the most famous de Havilland
aircraft—the Mosquito, constructed
primarily of wood because of the
shortage of aluminium during the
Second World War. The company
followed this with the even
higher-performing Hornet, which was
one of the pioneers of the use of
metal-wood and metal-metal bonding
techniques.
After the
Second World War, de Havilland
continued with leading-edge designs
in both the military and civil
field, but several public disasters
doomed the company as an independent
entity. The experimental, tailless,
jet-powered de Havilland DH 108
Swallow crashed in the Thames
Estuary, killing Geoffrey de
Havilland Jr, son of the company's
founder. A large additional aircraft
factory was acquired in 1948 at
Hawarden Airport at Broughton near
Chester where production
supplemented the Hatfield output.
The de Havilland Comet was put into
service in 1952 as the
eagerly-anticipated first commercial
jet airliner, twice as fast as
previous alternatives and a source
of British national pride. The Comet
suffered three tragic and
high-profile crashes in two years.
Less well remembered, but equally
disastrous, was the in-flight break
up of the DH 110 prototype during
the 1952 Farnborough Airshow, which
also killed members of the public.
Following
the structural problems of the
aircraft in 1954, all remaining
Comets were withdrawn from service,
with de Havilland launching a major
effort to build a new version that
would be both larger and stronger.
This one, the Comet 4, enabled the
de Havilland airliner to return to
the skies in 1958. By then, the
United States had its Boeing 707
jetliner along with the Douglas
DC-8, both of which were faster and
more economical to operate. Orders
for the Comet dried up.
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Hawker
Siddeley bought de Havilland in 1960
but kept it as a separate company
until 1963. In that year it became
the de Havilland Division of Hawker
Siddeley Aviation
and all types in production or
development changed their
designations from "DH' to "HS" (see
Hawker Siddeley Trident and BAe
125). The famous "DH" and the de
Havilland name live on, with several
hundred Moths of various types and
substantial numbers of many of the
company's other designs still flying
all over the world.
De Havilland
returned to the airline world in
1962 with a three-engine jetliner,
the DH 121 Trident. However, the
design was modified to be smaller to
fit the needs of one airline and one
man: MRAF Sholto Douglas later Lord
Douglas of Kirtleside, chairman of
British European Airways. Other
airlines found it unattractive and
turned to a rival tri-jet: the
Boeing 727 which was much the same
size as the original DH 121. De
Havilland built only 117 Tridents,
while Boeing went on to sell over
1,800 727s.
De
Havilland also pushed into the new
field of long-range missiles,
developing the liquid-fuelled Blue
Streak. It did not enter military
service but became the first stage
of Europa, a launch vehicle for use
in space flight. In flight tests,
the Blue Streak performed well—but
the upper stages, built in France
and Germany, repeatedly failed. In
1973, the Europa programme was
cancelled, with Blue Streak dying as
well. The last of them wound up in
the hands of a farmer who used its
fuel tanks to house his chickens.
Source:
Wikipedia
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